PlusNet Community Website

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The following statement from Lee has been posted on our homepage.

Today we have announced that BT has made a recommended offer to buy the entire share capital of PlusNet.

Due to the nature of our business, and our key relationships with our customers and our employees, we have given due consideration to BT’s intention to maintain and develop those relationships.

We have to be sure that any approach for our business has to deliver a good return for shareholders whilst ensuring an enhanced strategy for our customers and employees.

Essentially, the key strength of our business is the entrepreneurial spirit combined with a sense of community in our approach to customers and employees. These qualities are some of the factors that make our business attractive to BT.

We have a close working relationship with BT and have explored a number of projects that could drive benefit to our business and customers and to this end we can now progress this value creation and benefits to our customers.

This transaction will allow us to develop our business model, maintain our cultural approach and benefit from:

• greater investment capability
• access to new products and services including BT’s WiFi Fusion and BT Vision propositions ; and
• access to BT Retail’s broadband network platform and the associated scale benefits.

BT’s immediate plans are to continue to operate PlusNet as a separate entity within the BT group from its Sheffield offices. It is of great importance to BT to retain PlusNet’s distinct identity and culture and for it to continue to trade under the PlusNet brand.

BT intends to continue to leverage and develop PlusNet’s Workplace platform and has no immediate plans to integrate PlusNet into existing BT services, maintaining its focus on the internet serviced, discerning user, at competitive broadband rates. BT believes that, by combining this platform with its existing resources and expertise within BT Retail, the customer experience will be enhanced.

Regards,
Lee Strafford
CEO PlusNet PLC

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Over the last few weeks we have initiated a project to launch a cross-visp community website for users of PlusNet, Force9, Free-Online and Metronet. It’s a really exciting project and we hope to bring together a wide range of community features such as forums, chat rooms, blogs, video diaries as well as community and PlusNet news.

This is part of a wider plan to improve our websites and to further improve communication and interaction with our customers. We want to streamline the experience of customers signing-up to a service with us and provide a number of tools to enrich existing customers’ use of our portals. Aside from this project, we are currently working on an easier to use, more helpful signup process.

We have created the following initial prototype designs and it would be great to hear your feedback if you have any!

>> Community Site Prototype

>> Customer Homepage Prototype

So… what do you think?  Any ideas for features, content, or design are welcome!

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Are you getting 404 errors on your favourite David Hasselhoff pictures?  Who said backups weren’t important?  It would appear Pipex have deleted a large amount of customer data on it’s paid hosting platform.
>From The Inquirer :

Pipex, caused havoc for its web site clients last week during planned maintenance. It lost virtually all of the web site data from its ‘Platinum’ server.

Consequently customers hosted on the Platinum server needed to restore their websites from their own backups. Several disgruntled customers contacted the INQ as a result.

Pipex claimed that it had recently emailed customers to remind them to keep such backups “so hopefully this will have mitigated the impact,” the company argued limply.

How did this happen? Well, at the exact moment the server suffered a system failure, the backup service had started running and overwrote the backups with blank data.

The moral of the story is … keep your own backups.

You can read the full Service Status posting made by Pipex, here.  Ouch!

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